Focal Points Blog

A few weeks ago, Penguin India decided to remove from circulation and destroy any remaining copies of a 2009 book, The Hindus: An Alternate Anthology, by Wendy Doniger, an eminent scholar of Hinduism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The decision sparked widespread outrage and criticism within literary circles in India and abroad.

Penguin India’s decision came after a three-year court battle over a 2011 lawsuit filed by the Shiksha Bachao Andolan (Save Education Movement), a right-wing Hindu group. The suit claimed that the book hurt “the religious feelings of millions of Hindus” and violated Section 295a of the Indian Penal Code, which makes “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class of citizens” criminally punishable.Read More

There are currently 7 billion people living on our planet. Some 80 percent, or 4.7 billion, of those people live on a meager $10 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population holds just 5 percent of global income, while the richest 20 percent holds 75 percent. The stark divide between the rich and the poor was addressed in a series of conferences and summits held by the United Nations that culminated in the United Nations Millennium Declaration in September 2000. From this summit the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were born.

The MDGs consist of eight broad goals that range from eradication of extreme poverty and achieving universal education to ensuring environmental stability and fighting diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS. The goals, agreed to by all the world leaders that attended the summit, are laudable—after all, eradicating poverty is one of our most pressing global issues—however, they are not free from criticism.Read More

The Sochi Olympics proved to be a big success — exactly what Russia wanted. Right from the opening ceremony itself, the entire event was a megalith in terms of popularity and success. If one wanted to catch a glimpse of Russia’s glorious past as well as its vibrant art, this year’s Winter Olympics were the thing to watch!

But the Olympics at Sochi were not without their share of controversy. Take, for example, the case of the Pussy Riot protest performance.

In an article at Foreign Policy titled The Disappeared, James Traub reports on journalists who have been kidnapped in Syria, either by Islamist extremist rebels or by forces for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. At one point he was introduced to (emphasis added):

… Hamza Ghadban, a Syrian journalist. … He was convinced, as many rebel sympathizers are, that the regime has subterranean connections with the foreign jihadists. He told me that the ISIS camp in Aleppo had been unscathed until the jihadists decamped, while the next-door headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, affiliated with the FSA, had been leveled by government artillery. In Raqqa, too, the ISIS base had not been shelled. It’s also widely believed that in the summer of 2012, Assad released from prison some of the Sunni extremists who had fought American troops in Iraq, and who may then have joined with foreign fighters to form ISIS. Those fighters now seem at least as preoccupied with dislodging moderate rebels from key checkpoints and northern towns as they are with fighting the regime.Read More

On February 15 at FPIF Focal Points, Rob Prince wrote, “At a moment when the only viable path open to resolving the Syrian conflict lies in a negotiated settlement between the Assad government and the legitimate opposition, two colleagues at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies, Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel of the Center for Middle East Studies, have put forth an emotional and poorly conceived call for military intervention to resolve the escalating humanitarian crisis there” in a New York Times op-ed. Now Coleen Rowley, who you may remember for the service she performed for the nation as a post-9/11 FBI whistleblower, weighs in.

Most commentary about Secretary Gates’ Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War has focused on his pithy comments about members of the Bush and Obama Administrations, but I found the more important story in a message he may not have intended. At a Sept 3, 2010 meeting in Kandahar with Brigadier General Nick Carter, discussing the local power broker, Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK), President Karzai’s half-brother, Carter said that

… for the foreseeable future, the choice facing us was between a theocracy run by the Taliban or a “thugocracy” run by the likes of AWK. He said that working with AWK offered the best way to show results quickly against the Taliban. [Gates] told Carter that ‘if working with AWK helped keep our troops alive and succeed in their mission, then that’s no contest.’

This heads-down focus on the immediate fight, devoid of political or social context, goes a long way towards explaining the failures of our longest war.Read More

Yesterday I posted thatthe Transform Now Plowshares Three were sentenced for their infiltration and protest at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on July 28, 2012. CBS News reported Sister Megan Rice’s response to her three-year sentence.Read More

The Transform Now Plowshares Three were sentenced for their infiltration and protest at Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on July 28, 2012. I guess it could have been worse. CBS News reports (emphasis added):Read More

Ukraine President Yanukovych and Russian President Putin. Image Wikimedia Commons

Calling the scene in Independence Square, Kiev, “apocalyptic,” Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer of the New York Times reported on the demonstrations yesterday, during which 25 demonstrators were killed by the Ukrainian riot police, known as the Berkut. They write that what “began as a peaceful protest in late November against” Ukraine President Viktor F. Yanukovych’s “decision to spurn a trade deal with Europe and tilt toward Russia became on Tuesday a pyre of violent chaos.”Read More

Samuel Huntington wrote: “In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of the Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.”

The opinions expressed are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Foreign Policy in Focus.

On the next day after President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union (SOTU) 2014, which did not mention anything about the tension in East Asia, not even the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Tokyo-based The Diplomat published an article to ask whether Obama “has abandoned the Pivot to Asia”1:

… he couldn’t make room for even a sentence in his speech … his neglect of these issues … brings the rebalance to Asia into question.2

While the disappointment and frustration within the hawkish camp are understandable, Obama’s silence on East Asia as well as two exact same headlines with respect to the SOTU inArmy Times and Navy Times — “Obama emphasizes diplomacy to strengthen security” — indicate that the incumbent master of the White House has made a wise move to prevent a disastrous “clash of civilizations.”3 In his renowned 1997 book of the same name, Samuel P. Huntington sees the states in “the West” as a civilization group sharing among themselves such core values as democracy, pluralism, individualism, rule of law and Christianity; some other civilizations, such as the Muslim and the Chinese, however, do not appreciate these values and tend to resist them.4Read More

About

We sniff out issues hiding in the foreign-policy forest and haul them back to the laboratory for inspection. We examine the anterior, posterior, and underside of an issue, as well as its shadows.

This blog provides a commentator with an opportunity to express his or her convictions more forcefully than may be appropriate for an article. If you have unique insight into a foreign-policy (or affairs) issue, please feel free to write a post and send it to editor Russ Wellen at [email protected]